Blogging

I've been blogging since January, 2003 -- almost eight years, a long time. Maybe it's time to quit. Or maybe I'm getting burned out. Or maybe it's time to change.

Curiously enough, I still have enough daily visitors, my stats tell me, to bumble on, so I do. I have been. But things feel different here from my end.

In the beginning, I conceived this as a record of the interior life, the process, of a working writer, and I saw my audience as young writers. As a young writer myself, I loved reading diaries and journals of writers -- so a blog was a kind of public journal serving this same purpose. In time the focus broadened and much more than writing has been discussed. Over more time, I found issues, often personal issues, I wanted to write about without feedback -- that is, I didn't want to start an argument or solicit advice or hurt feelings, so I started a posthumous blog, a blog that won't become public until after I pass. I still occasionally write there.

I also started other blogs, all short-lived in terms of activity. The idea of two old farts talking politics over coffee never went anywhere and if I resurrect it, it will be an animation. Satiric songs about our singular mayor had its time in the sun. The Writing Life became The Writing Life II when the host format changed and I wanted to take advantage of bells and whistles not available in the old format. It was a technical change, not a substantive one.

I do like writing here. The issue really is, do I write publicly or not. I can write exclusively in the posthumous blog, for example. I've been brooding about this. I suppose my increased sense of alienation -- that is too strong a word -- of disconnection, contributes. "My world" has passed and gone. I prefer it to the world that has replaced it. What else is new?

This cyclic phenomenon, in fact, has me thinking much about the chamber opera I want to do based on the work of Norman Brown, who has made more sense of the cycle than any thinker I've encountered. Brown offers no social/political remedy -- only individual, mystical remedy, and I agree with him, though perhaps our sense of this is different. I embrace Voltaire as much as Brown in this regard. The new physics especially interests me in this regard, and the work of someone like Amut Goswami.

I don't have time to do everything. I've been thinking of jumping into the Brown material, which means moving Life... to a back burner. Or maybe I can work on the vocal scores of both at the same time. Might be tricky. At any rate, I do think I should focus on the music and delay the animation until later. I started animating Life... and made enough progress to tell me it will work, though I have more, many more, skills to learn.

At breakfast yesterday, I told M. I often felt I was "hallucinating" while writing here. That is, hallucinating that anyone actually gave a damn. The assumption of this, of the literary archive, of the whole work, the entire life, is that it actually matters. Now and again I wonder if it actually does.

This is not a morbid thought. It's a cold, calculating thought. It's an existential thought.

Camus tells us that for Sisyphus, the struggle alone is enough to fill a man's heart. When I believe that, I am good. But now and again I have doubts.

Well, here I am blogging. Do I continue? No progress. Back to brooding about it.